Current storage management systems employ a number of different methods to perform storage operations on electronic data. For example, data can be stored in primary storage as a primary copy or in secondary storage as various types of secondary copies including, as a backup copy, a snapshot copy, a hierarchical storage management copy (“HSM”), as an archive copy, and as other types of copies.
Storage systems may scan the file system of a client or other computing device for various reasons, such as to determine which data objects on the client should be associated with a particular storage operation. For example, this determining may involve collecting metadata by scanning or traversing the file system of the client prior to performing storage operations. The scanning process is typically time-consuming and uses significant client resources that might be more desirably spent performing other tasks associated with production applications. Thus it is desirable to limit the frequency of file system scans. To reduce the number of file system scans, a system may update the metadata obtained from a scan using other information generated and cached by a change journal process during and after a scan. However if a volume on a client's file system is large and/or a file system experiences a high rate of changes to files, the information cached by a change journal process alone may be insufficient to update the metadata to reflect all system changes that occurred during a scan. The scanning process may also need to be restarted anew if the scan is paused for any reason before its completion.
The need exists for a system that overcomes the above problems, as well as one that provides additional benefits. Overall, the examples herein of some prior or related systems and their associated limitations are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of existing or prior systems will become apparent to those of skill in the art upon reading the following Detailed Description.